Olja Savicevic - Adios, Cowboy

After a while, in the Old Settlement, we began to avoid Herr Professor. Stories were going around. People stick a stinking badge on you, which everyone can see apart from those who have been marked like that — they even wonder where the stench, wtf , is coming from. Like when you tread in dog dirt, and don’t realize that what’s smelling is your shoe.

Even Jill, with instinctive feline opportunism, avoided our neighbor’s doorway, even though she would have found bits of skin and meat in the kitchen, and mice and lizards in the garden.

Daniel, who lacked any curiosity about village intrigue and scandal mongering — but who was passionately and joyfully curious about animals — once used to go on whole-day visits to the vet’s. But with time, he too stopped going, I recall. That was shortly before the incident.

At the time the incident occurred, I was thoroughly settled in Zagreb, so I can’t say all that much about it. My brother had just begun to hang around with Iroquois Tomi, the younger Barić, and some of his other local contemporaries, my sister told me. They mended motorbikes and got up to the usual secondary-schoolboy foolish things.

Later word went around that Tomi and Daniel and some of the other Iroquois Brothers had thrown stones at a bus on the route Old Settlement — Northern Habor — Center and almost killed the driver. But that wasn’t true, Ma said.

It seems that this was the work of Ear and Tiny, my sister affirmed. I knew Ear and Tiny, two jerks who dressed like Puff Daddy and Eminem.

Now all the actors in that story are corpses.

Ear was sent to a San Patrignano home and all trace of him was then lost. Some say that his body was found burned in a container, somewhere near Ancona.

Tiny had a whole barrelful of bullets emptied into him by a stranger, from behind, as he rode his Vespa.

The younger Barić, was killed on the road. He was walking along the tarmac and taken out by a drunken truck driver. I’m really sorry about him, he wasn’t crazy.

When the incident occurred, when Herr Professor was beaten up and his apartment trashed, I recall, all those lads from the Settlement were summoned to the police station. Including Daniel.

Ma was beside herself, my sister said.

“The man was almost done for,” said Ma, meaning Herr Professor.

“Dear God, I’d prefer he was killed himself rather than have him kill anyone else,” said Ma, meaning my brother.

It ended with the vet making a statement that it was not those lads, Daniel’s pals, the papers reported.

Soon afterward, Herr Professor left the Settlement, while “the perpetrators were not found,” it was reported, I recall.

People carried on gossiping. That the vet had got a job with the UN peacekeeping force, looking after the army dogs, that he had worked his way through half the soldiers or they through him — stories like that were extremely popular at the time — and had finally moved to the Netherlands with a young UN employee.

It was also said that he had a clinic on the other side of town, also that he had married a woman vet with whom he was living in a basement with a little garden, but there were no children.

Ma was convinced that she had seen him once at the Bazaar, stealing a walnut from a pile on a stall; he had passed on quickly, presumably afraid of the stallholder, and Ma would have called to him to say hello, but she simply couldn’t remember his real name.

And now he’s come back.

“That old gay’s back,” said my sister when she called me in Zagreb, after she had opened the conversation with a desperate: “I don’t know what to do with her.” Meaning Ma.

“I can’t leave her like this, but I have to go back to work, I’ve got revision for those losers with resits.”

Then a sigh.

Then: “Hell.” And: “You thinking of coming?”

“Not that soon,” I said, the day before yesterday in Zagreb.

And then my sister said that, that the man I’d given up looking for had come back.

As though I’d been summoned from a stuffy waiting room after I’d already given up the ghost five or six times, I thought.

It took me half an hour to pack a bag with everything I could cram into the idea of my life.

“The number you have dialed is currently unavailable,” maintained my sister’s voicemail when I got off the bus and called her. It was already late, I observed, they would be asleep. Ginger Jill slept on Mother’s feet, Ma lay on her back like a corpse, with a burned-out cigarette in her fingers, while my sister up in the attic slept with her hair in a firm nighttime plait, curled up, with a pillow over her head. On way home. Be there early morning. Press. Sent.

Make something of your life, they say. But what can you make of your life if you don’t have money for a taxi? Your old man never set foot in a taxi. Your old lady never set foot in a taxi. And you live in a country where such a thing is expensive, a privilege. I can see you’ll never marry. No-no-no, don’t get annoyed. You’re not bad, and you’ve got a nice jacket, but you’re a one-off. Try to make something of your life, get an education, if you’ve got connections, let them sort you something where you won’t slave for peanuts, but know this — if your old man never set foot in a taxi, there’s only the remotest chance that you will and that’s the way things are. A brave insight into that fact is the most you’ll achieve in life. Such are the times, such is the place. You and I will always have enough for a decent pair of shoes, because we know that decent shoes are the most we can have. You and I will always have decent shoes: we need them because we don’t have money for a taxi.”

That’s what the guy at the bar said. He sat down beside me, slurping his beer.

Tubby Diana had turned off the music after the police intervened.

In front of the building, by a parked BMW, some lads had got together over a bottle of Chivas Regal. You could hear the kitsch blaring even through the closed doors of the car.

Diana was drying glasses. She had that expression on her face, like abused women who have given up on themselves. But still on a knife-edge.

“If you said boo , she’d have a heart attack,” said my sister. But that’s the same expression women here have if they don’t have a man and they’re past twenty-something. Hey-ho. Where did I go wrong? The girls who never left the Old Settlement didn’t have a lot of choice.

Some became surfers’ babes, others motorcycle molls.

“Born groupies,” said my sister.

“Born to be wives,” she said.

Diana herself had married a boy from the Settlement for whom his Yamaha was the be-all and end-all. He shortened the exhaust and sped past her house until she married him, I recalled.

“Rats,” yawned the guy at the bar, glancing through the door at the lads by the BMW.

“Oh, leave them be,” Diana said, smiling bleakly. She wanted to go home without gunshots and sweeping up glass. Me too, I thought.

“Racketeers,” muttered the guy in our direction. One of them seemed familiar to me, as though I’d seen him at one time in Daniel’s company, when I used to come home from uni. But when our eyes met, he turned his head away, quickly.

I’ve known Diana my whole life. We all called her Tubby Diana, because she had been a tubby child. Now she’s thin, but the Tubby has stuck. She’s no older than me, and she has two little sons with the biker, twins, and her face is puffy.

“All the local lasses are bloated with alcohol by their twenties,” said the guy, tipsily. “Maybe that’s your fate as well. Accumulating fluid,” he informed me.

Diana could give me a lift home when her shift ends, I’d thought as I dragged my suitcase along and caught sight from the street of the familiar pink neon sign of the Last Chance with its painted green palm.